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How to Fix the Criminal Justice System: A Student-Created Debate and Lesson Plan

Even prisons are subject to Norway’s requirement that every building receiving public money have some sort of public art. Here, a mural by the pseudonymous graffiti artist Dolk in an exercise yard at Halden Fengsel. Related ArticleCredit Knut Egil Wang for The New York Times

Students might read the arguments and answer some of the discussion questions, and then, using the piece as a model and the related resources for additional ideas, create their own Room for Debate-style projects on issues that concern them.

What Aspect of the Criminal Justice System Should We Fix First?

There has been consensus among many that the United States’s criminal justice system — from the police force to the legal system to the prison system — is broken. However, overarching, significant reform of will take time and stretch limited resources. What aspect of criminal justice reform should the United States pursue first?

Below, three students from across the country take different perspectives on that question. What do you think?

A Trigger-Happy Task Force

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Henry Xu is a high-school senior from San Diego, Calif.

To say law enforcement is a difficult job would undoubtedly be an understatement. Unexpected, sometimes life-threatening, encounters with dangerous individuals are the foundation of a career whose primary purpose is to serve and protect the public. As a result, the police are currently given considerable leeway in their judgment of response to potential threats. To quote the movie “Anchorman,” it’s a system that “60 percent of the time, it works every time.” Which means, in other words, that it frequently fails to deliver on its promise to the American people.

In 2001, police use of force was defined by the The International Association of Chiefs of Police as “the amount of effort required by police to compel compliance by an unwilling subject.” It’s an amount of effort that has grown alarmingly lethal in recent years, and increased media coverage of incidents in cities like Cleveland, Baltimore and Chicago has sent waves through the nation.

To make matters worse, these explosive confrontations occur unequally across all demographics, with questions of racial bias coloring most cases of force. The Washington Post found that from January to July of 2015, unarmed black men were seven times more likely to die from police gunfire than their white counterparts.

Changes have been proposed by numerous parties, and in some states, city police departments have already taken steps to curtail the use of excessive force. In 2014, a Federal District Court threw out a challenge filed by Seattle police officers to new guidelines on force that had been adopted after a Justice Department investigation. Other proposed changes, such as the adoption of a necessity rule, which would mandate lethal force only as a last resort, have seen considerable support from some states, while facing fierce opposition by others.

While a shift in regulations is necessary to reform police use of force, the maintenance of the status quo is heavily assisted by a general lack of accountability for situations where force is improperly used. Fortunately, improvements are slowly being made. The Inspector General of the New York Police Department, in a report on the use of force in the city last year, noted that while the department historically, “has frequently failed to discipline officers who use force without justification,” discipline rates for those confirmed to have used excessive force have increased in recent years.

Reform is happening — but not fast enough. With murky protocol for situations requiring use of force, an ineffective method of imposing disciplinary action for officers who overstep their bounds, and an apparent racial bias that plagues its officers every step of the way, law enforcement should be the primary center of attention. There is no doubt that our criminal justice system is broken. But if we can’t get the accused abusers to the courts in the first place, there will be no justice system to fix at all.

Let’s Fix the Legal System — Now

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Sabrina Conte is a high school senior from Glen Ridge, N.J.

The principles of equality, fairness and justice have always been part of our national identity. Our legal system — the matrix of laws and courts that create and review decisions on right and wrong with the ultimate goal of protecting the rights of American citizens — is perhaps the most important tool with which to defend these principles.

However, our biggest obstacle in this defense might just be the institution itself. The legal part of the criminal justice system is plagued with faults that reduce its ability to fulfill its obligations to the American people, doing them major harm in the process.

One fault lies in one of the most fundamental aspects of the system: the evidence. Certain types of evidence we take as ironclad proof of guilt are far less accurate than they seem. Bite-mark matching was discredited by the National Academy of Sciences. The F.B.I. recently admitted that “nearly every examiner in an elite F.B.I. forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.” And “unassailable proof of guilt” like eyewitness testimony, confessions or forensic evidence can be inaccurate because of the unreliability of memory, police coercion, or the implicit biases of presiding forensic examiners.

These inconsistencies have consequences. One of the easiest to see is wrongful conviction, which leaves people languishing for years in prison because of a justice system that fails to protect them. Consider Hector Ayala, an inmate who is sitting on death row because of race-based jury selection (illegal under Supreme Court ruling), and who the courts have refused to retry or release. Read the story of Sandeep Bharadia, who was convicted to life without parole. When newfound DNA evidence seemed to prove his innocence, he was refused another trial because of mistakes made by his lawyer.

These cases are just the beginning. There is potential for mistreatment in every level of the system. There are judges who refuse to recuse themselves from cases where there are clear conflicts of interest, and there are abusive prosecutors who purposefully withhold evidence establishing a defendant’s innocence. The overfilled court systems of urban areas make cases drag on for years, becoming an expensive and emotion-filled burden for victims.

And to make things worse, our legal system inflicts major harm on those who can least afford it: minorities and the poor. The Justice Department ruled that St. Louis county in Missouri was biased against black juveniles, saying that “judges made no real effort to determine whether pleas were coerced, whether defendants had any criminal intent, or whether they understood the full consequences of admitting guilt.” The bail system holds people in jail based on whether they can afford to pay, disproportionately affecting the poor by forcing them to forego paychecks and subjecting them to dangerous prison conditions. Understaffed and underfunded public defender’s offices have started turning defendants away, leaving those who cannot pay for a private lawyer with few options.

Our current legal system is unjust. It allows systematic violations of ethics, accepts flawed or uncertain evidence as proof of crime and targets those who most need defending. It needs to be revamped immediately — or it will continue to threaten the intrinsic freedoms of American citizens.

A Failed System of Punishment — America’s Mass-Incarceration Problem

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Grace Masback is a high school junior from Portland, Ore.

As a white woman in the United States, my odds of being sent to prison are 1 in 111. For my younger brother, a white male, the odds are 1 in 17. But for my male African-American friend, the odds have been reported to be 1 in 3.

The United States’s criminal justice system is broken, and the way our nation manages crime and criminals is inefficient and ineffective. The system’s greatest shortcomings have been policies of punitive, not rehabilitative, punishment, which have resulted in mass-incarceration, incredible expenses, and soaring recidivism rates.

The United States holds the world’s highest rate of incarceration, about 750 people per 100,000. This rate surpasses those in Rwanda, Russia, China and North Korea. Although Americans make up just under 5 percent of the world’s population, the country’s prisons hold 22 percent of the world’s prisoners.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with using prison to punish and separate dangerous individuals from society, America’s system is so overwhelmed it has forgone the possibility of redemption, handing down long sentences instead of looking for ways to reintegrate criminals into their communities. The average burglar in the United States receives a sentence of 16 months, while the same crime receives a five-month sentence in Canada.

Prisoners need education, skills and job training to help break cycles of poverty that put many of them behind bars in the first place. Educating prisoners saves the public almost $5 for every $1 spent on prison education, but the commitment to educational initiatives is inadequate and in decline. While 70 percent of prisons had education programs in the early ’90s, only 4 percent had them in 2004. Only 141 inmates earned degrees in 2011. The lack of focus on education and rehabilitation leads to rising recidivism rates, with 68 percent of released inmates returning to prison. This costs billions in taxpayer dollars as the United States spends $31,000 per inmate each year, or around $40 billion annually on its prisons.

Ultimately, the system puts entire communities in a state of perpetual hardship. By age 18, one in four African-American children will have had a parent incarcerated. For the 70 million Americans with criminal records, it’s harder to get an apartment, job, government assistance or to even vote. Such a system builds resentment and mistrust and creates a cycle of poverty.

America was founded as a nation of liberty and opportunity. As a young person, I don’t want to inherit a country characterized by barbed wire and the abject abandonment of broad swaths of society. Before dealing with other broken aspects of the criminal justice system, we must address the root causes of soaring incarceration rates, embracing restorative and rehabilitative justice. Trust between the police and communities can be rebuilt by ensuring that young people are no longer imprisoned en masse for interminable sentences. We must move aggressively toward a system that identifies value in all individuals, no matter their actions.

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Defendants awaiting their arraignments late on a Sunday night at the Kings County Criminal Court. Related ArticleCredit Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

Questions for Writing or Discussion:

Which aspect of our justice system should we fix first? Whose arguments convinced you the most? Why?

What are some ways that individual states or other countries are working to reform their justice systems? What aspects seem to be working? Which aspects do not seem to be working? Should the United States adopt any of these policies?

Going Further:

Is the application of lethal force when “reasonable” an appropriate guideline in today’s society? Or, is the adoption of a necessity rule essential to protect the public from abuse of power by the police?

A police disciplinary system that blurs the line between punishment and reward is a main criticism of police departments in the United States. However, do police officers deserve to be punished to the same degree as criminals for doing their job?

How should the United States legal system ensure that all citizens are getting a fair trial? What can we do to prevent the poor and minorities from being disproportionately burdened by the legal process?

How can we make sure that people are not unfairly prosecuted because of biased or unreliable evidence? Should we make juries aware of the relative accuracy of each piece of evidence?

How can the country use the more efficient prison systems in other countries as a model in reforming its own?

How can and should the United States balance the use of prison as a crime deterrent and method of protection with the use of prison as a means of rehabilitation and renewal? To what extent are criminals worthy of our compassion?

The Room for Debate format, where students offer different research-based perspectives on a single question, can make for an engaging, substantive project, and The Learning Network has done a number of lesson plans and other features using it. Here are some ideas: